City Reshaping Building Codes To U.S. Model

By ERIC LIPTON

Published: May 17, 2004

New York City has embarked on the most comprehensive rewriting of its building, fire, plumbing and electrical codes since they were first adopted more than a century ago.

This quiet revolution will alter the city's inner landscape, from life-and-death details like fire sprinklers and the lighting in emergency stairways to mundane matters like allowing homeowners to save money by using plastic pipes for toilets and sinks.

The revisions -- the most important of which are now being drafted behind closed doors by 13 committees of engineers, safety experts and real estate developers appointed by the Bloomberg administration -- are not expected to make a radical difference in the way buildings are constructed. But because the codes have effectively been the city's DNA, shaping its appearance and its workings, the changes are likely to affect all the places in which New Yorkers live and work in myriad ways, big and small.

Stairwells in new high-rise buildings would have to be pressurized to keep them from becoming chimneys during a fire, under one possible change, while another -- opposed by many families of 9/11 victims -- would sharply reduce the amount of fireproofing required in many buildings. New precautions against earthquake damage could force developers in certain parts of the city where the soil is soft to build stronger, more expensive structures.

At bottom, though, the most surprising change is that New York is abandoning many of the intricate restrictions, carefully tailored to its quirks and jealously defended over the decades, that have made its codes a byzantine patchwork and have made the city one of the most difficult and expensive in which to put up a building. The city, in fact, is tossing out all of those codes, adopting standard codes in effect across the nation, then adding back pieces of the old rules as needed. And those additions have become the crux of sometimes fierce debate.

''This is a landmark turning point in the city's history as far as codes go,'' said Glenn P. Corbett, an assistant professor of fire science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a member of the committee reviewing fire-protection rules. ''New York City is preparing to give up its own homegrown codes, which are too expensive to maintain on our own and have left us way behind the rest of the country.''

The city's fire code would be drastically revised, with potential consequences for everything from how merchandise is stacked in warehouse-style stores to how much propane a hot dog vendor can store on his cart.

New kitchens will be required to have special electrical outlets to prevent electrocution, under a provision already passed into law. The way underground plumbing is laid out for new buildings may change, and even some urinals may look different.

The choices now being made by the committees, which require the approval of the City Council and the mayor, will be felt in New Yorkers' pocketbooks, both as savings and as new costs. They could influence how many lives are lost each year to fires and other calamities, and may even affect how many people are killed or injured the next time a terrorist strikes.

The city has already approved a new electrical code, which went into effect last year. The committees are expected to come up with recommendations for the building and plumbing codes in June, and a new fire code in the next year to 18 months.

So far, the effort has played out largely in closed meetings of about 400 panel members, as the Bloomberg administration tries to address disagreements early and in private. In interviews, committee members and others involved in the process said many of those disputes have come down to a clash between two typically antithetical goals: cutting building costs and increasing safety.

The Impact of 9/11

The move to revise the city's ground rules for building construction and maintenance began two years ago, prompted by a nationwide push to simplify and standardize building codes and to recognize new materials and technologies.

Many parts of these uniform codes, like the International Building Code and the International Fire Code, are less stringent and less costly than New York's. Adopting a so-called model code is expected to save New York builders tens of millions of dollars, from the town house where bathrooms will cost hundreds less because plastic pipe can be used instead of copper or brass, to the department store that state officials say now costs about $1.75 million less, on average, to build elsewhere in the state since Albany adopted the International Building Code in 2002.

Yet the other big thrust behind the city's effort came after Sept. 11, 2001, when safety experts and victims' families began a crusade to make New York's fire and building codes more stringent. An April 2002 explosion in a Chelsea sign shop that injured 36 people added to the urgency; federal investigators concluded that the fire code was so out of date that it did not prohibit the mixing of incompatible chemicals.